First, the good news, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not completely turning his back on the energy and climate change bill he co-authored and then walked away from just hours before it was set to be officially rolled out.
Now for the bad news, Democrats were set to release later today, a very preliminary draft of an immigration reform bill, says this tweet from Mother Jones’s Kate Sheppard. That’s not good for the climate change bill, which if left aside in favor of immigration reform, would likely not be debated until closer to the mid-term elections, when support for the bill would be all but dead.
The energy and climate change bill crafted by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Graham, would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. It includes a cap and trade system for utilities. It also includes funding for nuclear power, offshore oil and gas drilling, and carbon capture and sequestration. The is widely supported by environmental groups and industry groups. Despite all that good will, earlier today Graham told Ezra Klein of the Washington Post that he was ready to vote against his bill if immigration was scheduled ahead of it. “I care equally about immigration and climate change,” Graham tells Klein. “But if you stack them together this year you’ll compromise climate and energy. You’ll compromise my ability to get votes on climate change,” he warns.
Until Friday its seemed like an “all systems go” for the climate change and energy bill, which has been almost a year in the making. Signals from the White House were that after Wall Street reform, energy and climate change bill was next up. That’s why in the months leading to what would have been its official roll out, Graham, Kerry and Lieberman were actively negotiating with environmentalists, other Senators and industry groups in an effort to build a coalition that could get the legislation passed.
Now it’s true that the legislation never had the 60 votes to get passed, however it was closer to getting these votes (from both side of the isle) than a hurried immigration reform law.
However, given what happened last week in Arizona, immigration reform has become a top priority for Democrats. Graham says he’s not opposed to immigration reform — he recently op-ed with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) calling for such reform — but he argues that now is not the time to do it.
He tells Klein:
My advice is that securing the border now gives a guy like me who wants to get to comprehensive [immigration] reform the credibility to get there. But if you bring up immigration in this climate, you’ll divide the country further. You’ll get a huge vote for border security and interior enforcement, but when it comes to pathway to citizenship, you’ll break down big-time.
Without Graham Kerry and Lieberman can’t get Republicans to vote for their bill. Besides Kerry and Lieberman (since Monday the three senators have not met) the other person that could bring Graham back into the fold is President Obama, writes Jim Tankersley, in the Los Angeles Times.
Graham is probably ready to do a deal. He has said that he would support the legislation again if immigration reform is delayed until 2012 and if the White House comes out and support a controversial provision in the transportation section of the bill, which the White House has dubbed a “gas tax” and opposed but which Graham argues is not a straight gasoline tax.